Don't worry, this guy isn't going to take your jobs.
Aiutomation is going to take jobs away from mid-skilled workers, but don't worry, there will be more high and low-skilled jobs for us. And of course those mid-skilled workers just need some education and they can do anything, so they won't be losing their jobs either. It'll be great.
Why does this sound so familiar? Also I am laughing at all of this economy centralization. Marx certainly was right about the irony of history.
I love these feelgood articles that try to make it seem like nothing will change ever.
What low skilled jobs we got that robots can't do already if you factor out the cost?
I think that is the idea this article is trying to portray. "Don't worry you poor working class shmuck you'll never get replaced because you are too cheap and as long as you stay too cheap for porky to justify automation you will be fine"
That's a great way to guarantee a revolution.
That robot is kinda hot
That argument doesn't fly because they're already replacing minimum wage cashiers, for example.
Basically this. Its not that automation can't replace most of the jobs that people are worried about losing, its that (at least overall) most of those jobs pay below the threshold where replacing them becomes more profitable. It's kinda like how basic steam engines have existed since at least the 1st century AD, but there was no incentive to develop, improve, or implement it because ultimately slave labor was abundantly cheaper. There are always slaves to labor in the production process; it's simply a matter of at what point is it optimal to switch from human slaves to machine slaves.
That's the point though. We've had the capacity to automate these jobs for a while now, but haven't because it's been better in the short term for these businesses to pay low-wage workers. The automation is happening now because of threats that those jobs may not be as cheap as they used to be in the future. The computer cashiers are mostly being put into place now however not because it's infinitely cheaper, but as a scare tactic to try and drive people away from pushing for higher wages.
God damn it.
Except - outside the false claims about the "information technology revolution (which ultimately created a fraction of the jobs that it replaced) - it's not "employment" that's the question, so much as the quality of employment. Can anyone outside overpaid pundit blockheads like the author of the article really claim that the service industry jobs that have replaced unionised manufacturing jobs are better?
My guess is that there will be more low wage and part time jobs when automation start to accelerate. Some jobs won't need people as often, maybe only for a portion of the job or maybe to oversee things. A lot of these partially automated jobs would require companies to pay lower wages as well to stay profitable.
Exactly. But the author of the piece is just your stock standard pundit with a mindlessly optimistic vision of the future and little real world experience (and even less inclination towards gaining that experience).
You see, we're moving to an aspirational economy, where instead of being stuck in dirty, boring, jobs with decent remuneration we'll all be tour guides and fitness instructors!
One of the few good things about automation is eventually they'll automate hacks like the OP and Thomas Friedman out of a job
sound good
if we can all have service jobs no one has to do all the boring production
i see no flaw in this plan
What are the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse? Automation is one of them, but what others would you say will lead to its inevitable collapse?
What if all us proles get replaced before a communist revolution?
Will the robots embrace socialism?
Not so good
wea gonna die
Nah, that shit doesn't work. When you introduce computers to replace service jobs you lose business. People like to interact with other people, even in a very alienated state. Another person at their job knows what they're doing and will guide the process. A machine will just sit there and you (the customer) has to put in the mental effort to work it. No matter how simple the machine is, if you have to work it yourself it will turn people off because it requires them to engage more of their brain than they want to use. This is particularly true of poor people who are usually too exhausted from working so much by the time they go shopping.
And the best part is you don't even need to feel bad about the shitty hours and pay/benefits that they have, since obviously the fact they're working that job means that the enjoyment they derive from it more than compensates them for the shitty working conditions :^)
automation, pollution, famine, disease (anti-biotic resistant mega-viruses coming out of chinese factory livestock)
there will be highly skilled technician jobs for the percentage remaining after the culling
competition will force those technicians down to subsistence wages when they are now average labor
they then are the new proles
well, at walmart I see more people using the auto-checkouts than anything
They had engines that far back? Also, yeah, they would do that. The fucks.
To get rid of wage labor, we need to raise the minimum wage.
I would like to see data on how self-serve check-out kiosks are performing. They always seem to very popular at the grocery stores and supermarkets I use.
I've read that in the U.S., at least, the whole pushback against raising the min. wage for service workers because automationg!!1 was a red herring because plans to automate those workers were in the works for a long time anyway, long before the workers starting asking for a raise.
More like that's just how humans do business since forever and the interconnectedness of the 20th century made it impossible to hide.
WebM is a spoiler.
I don't have stats on hand, but it's widely known by corporate that they're slower. Just by looking at them you get the illusion that they're more popular because people take longer, so the lines will be bigger.
Fucking gear heads taking our jobs…